Kill Switch Read online

  “There’s no reason why mobile can’t handle small packets,” Diana said.” Maybe we don’t onion route over mobile devices for large media content, but regular messages and email will be just fine.”

  “Users have data limits,” Ben said. “If we send twice the data, it’ll cost them real money.”

  “A good portion of the time people are on wi-fi and plugged in,” Diana said, “so then the phone is just another node in the network. Doesn’t matter that it’s a mobile device.”

  “And even when it is,” Igloo said, “people are streaming virtual reality environments, video, and music all the time. A few small packets won’t make much of a difference.”

  “Except if you want to transmit all their data over the onion network,” Ben said, “that’s going to include those virtual reality environments, and movies, and songs. Everything. We can’t know what’s sensitive and what isn’t. So you’re increasing the cost of all of their transmissions.”

  Igloo hesitated, then sank into the couch. Ben was right. If they only encrypted traffic to potentially contentious destinations, then they’d be raising a red flag every time they did it on behalf of a customer. They had to protect everything.

  “We’ve got some problems, big problems that we don’t know how to fix, but I still need to do this. Are you willing to work on it with me? Can you keep it hidden from Amber?”

  “Sure,” Diana said. “I’ll fork the code, and we’ll work on a private repo shared between us.” She glanced at Ben.

  “I’m in. It’s an interesting problem to try and solve.”

  “There is no try,” Diana said. “Only do.”

  Igloo smiled. She was no longer working alone on this. They were a team now.

  Chapter 10

  Angie disembarked the plane, trailing her carryon behind her. Another day, another city. She’d lose track of where she was if it wasn’t for the regular emails from Matt, detailing where she was, what she was doing, and who she was speaking to. His help was the only thing keeping her sane.

  She stopped short, and someone bumped into her.

  “Excuse me,” the other person said, a slightly nasal accent anyone would have identified as a New Yorker; with a childhood spent growing up in Brooklyn, Angie further differentiated it as being from Manhattan. The woman wound around, her roller clipping the edge of Angie’s. The bag scraped Angie’s new 3D printed MakieBag, leaving a scuff. Damn her. Angie stared at the woman’s back, noticing her short brown bob above the collar of the black raincoat. Too fashionable for Angie’s taste. Angie liked to keep things practical. She shook her head.

  Did she really think it was her admin that kept her sane? There was a time when that was how she thought of Thomas. He’d been her link to sanity. Before that she’d thought the same of Emily, her best friend since childhood. Apparently she needed a lot of support. So much for thinking of herself as the lone wolf type.

  She looked forward to tomorrow night. After five straight days on the road, she’d be back home for an uninterrupted forty-eight hours with her husband. Thomas had tried to make plans to go out, and she’d refused. Takeout food was fine, but she wanted to be in her own home, her own bed, eating from her own dishes.

  Angie got moving, following signs for rental cars. She stood in line, waiting for the shuttle to the rental area.

  “What agency?” the driver asked when she boarded.

  “Hertz.”

  She stuck her bag in the suitcase rack and grabbed a seat across the aisle.

  She had put the finishing touches on tomorrow’s presentation while she was on the plane. Tonight she’d spend the evening working on what she’d come to think of as The Mission, everything related to teaching people the critical thinking skills that everyone so desperately needed. People needed an inoculation, something to make them resistant to information manipulation.

  She hoped she still had the energy, as it was, she was running on fumes. Why did the important work come after everything else?

  Several more people boarded before the bus pulled away from the curb. Angie’s stomach groaned. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a proper meal. She missed lunch due to the last minute financial call she had to take. She’d been on the plane during dinner, stuck in Economy class, and the two bags of pretzels she’d scarfed in-flight weren’t going to cut it. There was no time tonight to go out. She’d get room service at the hotel and hope the food came fast, but it never did.

  She stared at the bags across from her, fuzzy with hunger and exhaustion. Her dark red bag, custom fabricated just a few weeks ago, already had a scuff mark where that woman’s bag had hit hers. The 3D printed material was never going to hold up, but she loved the custom design with the pockets she’d configured herself in the web app.

  She looked three bags down the row, saw a tan bag with a scuff mark at the same height as her own, a slight redness to the scuff that matched the color of Angie’s bag.

  She scanned the bus for the woman with the bob haircut but didn’t see her. Weird.

  “Last stop, Hertz,” the driver announced over the PA.

  Angie waited for the bus to stop, grabbed her bag, and stepped off, looking for the board with names on it.

  On a whim, she turned around and waited for the woman with the bob to get off the bus.

  The tan suitcase came off a few seconds later, pulled by a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, in a pantsuit and no coat. The woman walked straight past Angie into the reservation building.

  Angie couldn’t help but stare after her. That wasn’t the woman who’d collided with her before. Or, even more strangely, if that was the same woman, she’d gone and changed her appearance.

  Her heart skipped a beat, and suddenly her exhaustion vanished in a flood of adrenaline. Fuckity, fuck.

  Someone was following her. Some part of her past catching up with her. But which part? Did it have something to do with the assholes, domestic abusers she’d killed? The government? Founding Tapestry? A corporate spy? Something in her more distant hacker past? There was no way to know.

  Angie had to decide quickly. Did she try to dump whoever was following her now? She’d have to ditch her bag, electronics, and eventually clothes, in case there was a tracking bug. She could maybe get away, but to what end? Who was she running from, and what were they trying to do?

  Or should she play along, pretend that she’d noticed nothing, and figure out what was going on?

  It had to be the latter. She was in a strange city, with no resources, no cache of equipment. She couldn’t ditch everything on a whim. Besides, she had a company to run.

  Her pulse sounded in her ears, and suddenly Angie felt alive. With her exhaustion gone, the world, and her thoughts, became crystal clear.

  She turned back to the board, found her name, and walked out to her car. She started a list in her head. She’d want counter-surveillance devices in the future to detect bugs and tracking devices. A wireless jammer. A clean computer, with a software-defined radio. Directional wi-fi antenna. Cash. Untraceable gift cards. Hat and scarf with infrared IR transmitters to whiteout surveillance cameras. She’d bring what she could with her, have the rest mailed to whatever city she was flying to, to wait for her somewhere in a tamperproof box.

  Matt would balk at all the crazy instructions. She’d have Igloo do it. She started a secure chat, gave Igloo a small list of what she needed.

  Afterwards, she realized that wasn’t enough. She couldn’t just go reacting, not with everything she had to do. If this was a sign of new perturbations, then she couldn’t take the risk of being caught unaware. T2 and her other plans would need to be expedited. She had to be ready before the government acted.

  Chapter 11

  Nathan9 > How’d she respond when you bumped her bag?

  Meghan > She didn’t seem to notice. I caught her glancing around when we were on the rental shuttle. She’d figured out something was up then.

  Nathan9 > You did good. I’ll send the payment.

>   Nathan9 ended the chat with Meghan and rekeyed his ocular implant feed. His virtual computer screen faded away and was replaced by his living room. It was still as sparsely furnished as when he was blind, an environment designed for predictability.

  Meghan had done as he asked, followed Angie in the airport, on the shuttle. It was the sort of pointless move the government would make, putting a physical tail on a suspect in an airport. Not anything a hacker would bother with, not when there was abundant digital surveillance data available to achieve the same purpose.

  He’d planted Meghan, not to achieve anything useful, but to keep Angie focused on the government as the primary threat and to speed up Angie’s timetable.

  Tapestry and the government were playing a vast game of chicken, barreling toward each other down Al Gore’s information superhighway. Tapestry’s route was preordained in one direction, the government could only go in the other.

  It was so blindingly obvious.

  Ironically, he knew more than Angie about what the government was up to and had for months. He’d spent years cultivating his mole inside the FBI. He knew the FISA court order would come soon. He knew when Tapestry would be forced into compliance. He knew the timing and method by which the government planned to shut down Tapestry operations if it came to that.

  He’d tried, repeatedly, to reopen communications with Angie. He expected her to snub him, and she did. So he’d resorted to the trick with Meghan. It would light a fire under Angie, get her to pick up the pace on her little research project.

  Net neutrality, privacy, security, hackers, personalization, profiling, data ownership, corporate influence, cyber warfare, state sponsored hacking. There were continual mini-meltdowns every day, an ongoing battle with operations and security engineers on one side and countless malevolent actors on the other. The Internet was a pressure cooker, had been for years, decades even. That it all hadn’t collapsed catastrophically was a miracle.

  A metamorphosis of the net was coming. For years, the trend was toward an Internet in the control of governments and a handful of corporations. Angie was bucking the trend, seizing power not for herself, but for the people.

  Either way, no matter who won, an era was looming in which the Internet was going to become so secure and private that the kind of hacking he did would become nearly impossible.

  Angie had played him two years ago, when she’d forced his assistance in dealing with Tomo. In the process, she’d unwittingly disrupted his plans, forced him to call in favors he’d been planning to save, and, significantly, it had been the end of the long, weird association between the two of them.

  He could be angry, but he wasn’t. His new plans weren’t about vengeance, but relevance. Relevance in a future where the net had become so secure, either though Angie’s mission or corporate and government machinations, that hackers like himself would cease to exist.

  He rubbed his face with both hands. Because if you took away hacking, what would he have left? Get a job as a programmer? Retire and do nothing? Who would he be?

  There was a bigger issue, too. His drive to do something new, something more audacious, something to put a dent in the universe. He’d had his heyday once, when he was younger, and then a good long run with Dead Channel. But he didn’t want his run to be over. And he’d never been satisfied with the status quo. He always wanted something more.

  At this point, something more left one path forward. Be there when Angie acted, then seize power for himself. There would be no greater hack than exploiting for his own gain the very system of controls whose purpose was to ensure security and privacy.

  “Marvin, time for a walk.”

  The poor dog still hadn’t quite made the adjustment, still tried to guide Nathan, rather than the other way around. Well, they all had to adapt.

  Nathan triggered a window in his implant, watched Angie’s location update as she entered her hotel room. Saw the encrypted data connection to Tapestry’s servers. A few minutes later, Igloo’s phone went active. They were talking again.

  From this point out, Nathan9 would be watching.

  Chapter 12

  “He lives out in the West Hills,” Essie said, in the midst of making a tofu scramble. “You know I hate driving in the middle of the night, especially when I’m tired.”

  “So don’t drive late at night. Come home earlier.” Igloo gestured toward the scramble. “Can we try eggs sometime? It’s not that different from tofu really.”

  “Gross. I’m not putting animal parts in my body. Look, I didn’t complain when you asked to bring Charlotte to Deviance. In fact, I let you go by yourself. And you had sex with her. So why are you giving me a hard time now for wanting to sleep at Michael’s?”

  Igloo wasn’t sure what to say to that. First off, it sure seemed like Essie had been icy about Igloo asking to go to Deviance with Charlotte, and it hadn’t been until Essie had lined up her own date for that night that things changed. And she’d been upset about Igloo having sex with Charlotte. Ever since that day, Igloo never knew what to expect. Some days with Essie would seem halfway normal, and others would be one long fight. If there was one thing she could say about poly, it didn’t leave much time for sleep, or sex, or fun. Relationship discussions seemed to dwarf everything else.

  Part of it was that Essie was right: it didn’t seem fair for Igloo to want to go out with someone else, even fuck them, and then not want to allow Essie to do the same. But she still felt that way. The feelings didn’t magically go away. She wanted to say Don’t go. Stay home. Let’s spend the night together.

  Ugh. How did she become this jealous, clingy person? She hated the idea of Essie sleeping over at Michael’s. Of Essie fooling around, probably having sex with him, maybe even submitting to him in some kinky way.

  Part of her wanted to call off poly. But what if Essie refused?

  Of course, the other half didn’t want to give it up seeing Charlotte. She felt like she was going to explode with contradictions.

  “Look,” Essie said. “Go message Charlotte. Make plans for Thursday night. It’ll be easier if you’re distracted.”

  That was true, and the thought of seeing Charlotte gave her a thrill. Unease mixed with excitement left her with a fluttery stomach. Please let Charlotte say yes.

  She scanned the event listings, found a party at a venue she didn’t normally go to. She hated that place, but it would work. Hell, if Essie was out, there was a possibility that Charlotte could stay over.

  “Are you okay if Charlotte comes home with me?”

  Essie stopped buttering the toast and stared at Igloo. “Sure, I guess.”

  Well, that wasn’t what Igloo expected her to say. “We can sleep on the sofa, if it makes you uncomfortable for us to be in the bed.”

  “No, it’s fine. You’ll be more comfortable in the bed. Just change the sheets.”

  “Really?” Igloo wanted Essie to put up more of a fight. It was their bed, damn it.

  “Yeah, of course it’s fine.”

  Igloo squashed back the wailing despair rising inside her. Why did it feel like Essie didn’t care about their relationship? She was so confused. She was getting what she wanted, and yet…

  She gave up trying to understand herself or her increasingly complex feelings. Fuck it, she was getting what she asked for. She’d take advantage of that. She composed a message to Charlotte.

  Igloo > Good morning. I miss you. Are you available Thursday?

  She stared at the screen. No reply.

  Essie deposited some tofu scramble on top of toast and brought plates to the table.

  Igloo poured hot sauce over her food.

  “There’s already hot sauce under the tofu,” Essie said.

  “I want more.” She hoped for some physical sensation to override all the other feelings that threatened to engulf her. She stared at the phone. Still no reply.

  Part of Igloo felt guilty that she was trying to use Charlotte as a distraction, but she did legitimately want to see her. Ugh.
Why was it all so complicated?

  Igloo finished breakfast and went into work. It wasn’t until an hour later, when she was deep in work, unraveling a block of code for onion routing, that the reply finally arrived.

  Charlotte > I’m sorry, but I have plans Thursday. How about PDX Rated?

  Igloo glanced at her calendar. That was two weeks away. And she knew Essie really wanted to go to.

  Igloo > You free before then?

  Charlotte > I’m sorry. I’m crazy busy.

  She went into a whole explanation of all the things she was juggling, which included the life partner she lived with, and two other partners besides.

  Charlotte didn’t explicitly talk about tiers, but Igloo got the sense that she was in some sort of third tier with Charlotte: a good rope top and fun, but somewhere after her life partner and secondary partners in terms of importance. Sigh. She’d have to take what she could get.

  Igloo > Sure, PDX Rated would be great. I’m looking forward to it.

  Nine days. She could wait that long, right?

  Ugh. She’d just done it again. Said yes before checking with Essie. Now she had to tell Essie after the fact that she’d already committed to taking Charlotte to PDX Rated. Poly was like one long train wreck sometimes.

  She dove back into the code. She’d started leveraging the work done on the Invisible Internet Project, which used a variant of onion routing that they called garlic routing. It helped address one of the primary weaknesses of onion routing: traffic analysis attacks. Garlic routing encrypted multiple data packets together. In Igloo’s implementation, as data made its way from a source to a destination, it would get combined with other data before getting split off again and recombined with different data as it made its way from node to node.